Grrl Power #715 – Wormhole 101

So Sydney now has a passport to the galaxy. Sort of. She can’t really go zipping off to just anywhere… Well, she can, she just kind of has no idea where she’s going at the moment, unless she has a pathfinder. Fortunately, the orb’s “history tab” seems to remember some of the locations it’s been to, so she can probably explore and always have Earth marked as a recent travel location.

Unless that so called history tab is actually a bookmarks tab, in which case, Earth won’t appear on it unless she can figure out how to add it.

To Sydney’s point about the Nth leaving out useful features from the orbs, I think a lot of super advanced alien tech would be that way, even if it wasn’t god tier tech. If you were smart enough to do 11th dimensional math in your head, and you were the only person using the gadgets you created, it’s likely that your user interface would be an absolute nightmare to anyone but you. Quite frankly, it’s amazing the orbs are as user friendly as they are. Imagine if before firing the PPO, Sydney had to calculate the power used, the frequency of the wavelength, whether or not it was pure EM radiation or a particle beam what sort of particles to use, density, interval, aperture, distance to target, half-life of particle decay, etc, etc.

Obviously the orb would be less useful as a weapon if it took 5 minutes of fidgeting with it to get it to do anything, which is probably why there’s just a (mental) button to push to get it to work. But underneath the one button interface is probably a host of options that Sydney would never be able to muddle her way through, and if she did ever start playing with the settings, the PPO might wind up firing area effect gamma burst death fields instead of the neato cutting beam.

I’ve updated the vote incentive, but before you click on it, let me say something about it as it’s not my usual fare. I painted over a picture of a fitness gal helpfully showing her physique. The point of the picture wasn’t to impress with my knowledge of anatomy, I was using it to practice drawing shiny Maxima, so I thought I’d save some time and work from an existing picture. Turns out that didn’t actually save me a whole bunch of time, as I wound up repainting almost every part of the woman cause it had that jpeggy dithering all over it and it bugged me and I’m OCD that way.

So, after all that, I’m not too pleased with the results for a few reasons. One, it took forever, which means it’s impractical to do in the comic. Two, honestly it doesn’t look as good as I’d like. Of course, I was comparing myself to paintings like Alex Ross’s pictures of Silver Surfer and Iron Man, and that’s admittedly a high bar. My piece isn’t bad, but it could be a lot better. Whether or not it could be better and be done at a reasonable speed is another question. Three, there’s another problem with making Max shiny in the manner that I did, is that it relies heavily on sort of… subdividing Max by muscle groups and using those edges to cordon off the edges of the reflections. While that’s more or less how it works if you look at a polished chrome or gold statue, it makes make Max look like she’s cut to the bone. She is, like all supers, in very good shape, but she’s not 0% body fat, and I don’t want to draw her looking like that. She has some feminine softness to her, perhaps unless she’s really flexing and making her muscles pop, but the point is that this method of making her look shiny isn’t what I want it to ultimately look like.

But I learned a bit from doing it, plus now we have a kind of cheaty picture of Max to look at, so it’s all good.

Discussion (271) ¬

Sydney should now:
a) step outside the ship, with proper environmental safety.
b) press each bookmark image that she has, individually, and allowing Galen enough time between each one to scan and plot it’s destination from the causeway it opens.
c) press the glitchy one LAST.

Upon further consideration, they should do this away from the Fracture, and prying eyes.

Are you crazy? The glitchy one could be a planted on purpose bad destination that could rip them all apart if they tried it.

You dont know how it got there? It could be planted by some sorth of nth virus tech, or it could be the remnants of a saved location where the previous got intercepted and ripped out of the aetherium, and who knows what happened next.

Nonono, dont go there unless you’re sure where it leads, and hence you dont need to use the bookmark.

i mean someone had to have used these before our girl so what happened to them maybe they come to earth after getting hurt or sick or something to hide em, also these big things that attacked the planet our group just happened to worm hole to days before just like that……and was it me that they began to attack the group after Sydney move toward

I doubt they were looking for her, seems more likely the Alari empire bit off more than they could chew and ticked off something way above their weight class. Something that looked more like it recognized Sydney’s orbs and put them into panic mode (the scans of Dabbler and Maxima made no response), so chances are whomever made those orbs or something like them, the calamarimechs either recognized or seen something like them before; and it was something THEY were on the receiving end of being over powered before or had very hostile encounters with.

makes since also the fact that they where there may mean something but the theories around wormholes alot of the time have time differences so a day days ago on earth could have been months there and while the scans seen to kick things off its hard to think that something you can Not infact Scan like her orbs would not set offf a few notes of worry

Hey Cal the probe we left behind is picking up negative space occupations interacting with a humanoid shape.

-huh, that sounds familiar, didn’t one of our old allies encounter something like that when culling a prospective planet of its indigenous pests; and…it…exterminated their entire empire in retribution….ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!

Exactly, LordRowyn. Galen tracked the first causeway to the Fracture, without entering the causeway at all. Thus, Sydney opens each bookmark, and they can track where it goes without actually travelling to the destination.
One important thing about this is that some of the bookmarks will probably point to known, possibly interesting places, and some MAY point to origins of the orbs or the prior user.

or the destination of an ambush where massive energy weapon was fired at the previous owner as soon as they materialized, so the orb could only get a snapshot of the surrounding right in the middle of the blast, before being blasted away toward Earth after the owner died

Honestly think it would be funny if she tried and got either a voice over or some words in her eyes with a stock message like, “We’re sorry this destination is not available at this time, please try again later” or “Invalid Address”.

Whew. Memorizing the galaxy involves roughly 1×10^11 data points (stars) in a beyond humungus 3d coordinate system which, just for good measure, is slowly but constantly changing. Where do you hang your hat for a 0,0,0 reference point? The Pioneer 10 and 11 platters had maps of pulsars that supposedly pointed back to the Solar System’s location, but I wonder if anyone trying to use it would get within 20ly of the right place. Present computers might be able to handle the multi-terabyte minimum database if you’re patient. You’ll need a lot more storage to be able to uniquely identify which star is which. Spectral analysis? G0 stars like the Sun are as common as peas in a bowl, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke. Good luck!

I’ve tried to think out a stellar navigation system like Star Trek’s before, and I keep getting headaches.

And using ANY command-line OS, Windows or *nix, is kind of like joining a cult. You have to dedicate your life to an arcane language, doing obscure things that normal people just shake their heads at. My favorite is still the DOS/Windows CLI, but I usually install CYGWIN and put \cygwin\bin in the path, so I can combine DOS and *nix commands. At least with DOS/Windows:

1) There aren’t 319 slightly different distros;

2) Misery loves company – chances are somebody had the same or a very similar problem and posted in online, and Google can find it; and

3) With DOS/Windows, there’s an established company to call up and yell at. Half the Linux distros give me the impression the only person who supports that broken feature is passed out drunk again in the upper bunk of his dorm room.

And I’ve worked with both DOS and Linux support at my jobs over the years.

The Galaxy has a built-in 0,0,0 point, the supermassive black hole at the center. That’s the easy part along with defining one axis as the one perpendicular to the Galactic plane. Where the real fun begins is defining the other two aside from being in the Galactic plane.

Take cylindrical coordinate system, then only one axis remains to be fixed. Or rather fixed to a point in the rotating frame of the galaxy, to avoid having to recalculate all your coordinates every femtosecond or so.

Unfortunately, the closest “galaxies” are the Magellanic Clouds, which are not in line with the galactic plane (well below it). So saying that your measurement dimensions are start at the central black hole, radius from the singularity, distance above or below the galactic plane, angle from the centre of the Large Magellanic Cloud (in radians!) might not work so easily.

However for a cylindric coordinate system we don’t need a special plane per se. It can be defined as a plane orthogonal to the rotational axis of our (although warped) disk, fixing it at the proposed zero point of the system, the center of the galactic center. Whether this approach would be feasible in the vicinity of gravity wells of astronimical order remains to be discussed, as well as how to best measure that rotational axis precisely enough to hold for distances in the order of 10000 lightyears.

And in view of the distorted disk shape and especially for translating such a coordinate system to other types of galaxies, one should probably think about a spherical aproach.

If your centerpoint coordinates are the galactic hub, to define a point in 3D space, you need 3 cordinates. The first two are based on 360 degree circles, one following the horizontal plane of the galaxy like it’s a clock, and one sweeping up from the galactic plane toward the zenith, around and down past the far edge of the galactic plane toward the nadir, and back up again to the starting point. The third coordinate dictates how far out from the galacic hub (black hole).

After that, you need to designate a starting point, plus a direction for the degrees to sweep (clockwise or counterclockwise), and that means also designating which side is zenith (up) and which side is nadir (down).

My suggestion is to look at which way the galaxy is rotating. Since the center of it is a black hole that everything is “draining” into, then you flip the galaxy to the side that (being Earth-centric as we are), it appears that when looking down on it from above, the spiral “drains into the center” in a clockwise direction, aka the galaxy appears to move clockwise, and then match the degrees 0 rising on upward in a spin going to the left.

At that point, you need to designate a location as 0.00, 0.00, 360.00000 (if we’re using units of 360 for the other degrees, might as well divide the radius from center outward into 360 units plus decimal points!). This could be a nearby galaxy that is close to the main galaxy’s plane, something that can be considered fairly noticeable either by the naked eye or by modest telescopes, something fairly static in its relative position to the traveling rim of our galaxy…and flag that for being 0,0,360. (0,0,0 would be the center of the galaxy, and we’re trying to find a spot on the system’s edge.) At that point, traveling to the left on the flat plane, you move two degrees to the right and you’re now looking at 0,2,360, move 3 more degrees and you’re at 0,5,360 …etc. Or if you look up ten degrees and bring it in a tenth of the distance, you’re looking at the region of 10,5,324…until eventually, you’re looking at a boring blue dot in an unfashionable backwater of the Sagittarius arm where people are fascinated with little bits of paper and glowing little rectangles they sometimes keep in their pockets. Which is not located in the center of the galaxy, by any means.

Well, a galactic coordinate system for a spacefaring society shouldn’t be that hard to work out.

Let’s start with the origin point. If everyone’s coming from a single point (like, say, the solar system), that would actually make a good choice. You can then define three more axis on the basis of coreward/outward, spinward/antispinward, and north/south (relative to galactic spin). Sure, everything moving would mean you’d have to update coordinates of moving stars from time to time, but it’s slow on a human timescale, so it would be the equivalent of adding a few seconds to your clock every leap year.

In the case of the galactic community in grrl power, you don’t have a single origin point, so I’d go with the other obvious alternative: the center of galactic mass. That is not going to change significantly until Andromeda crashes into us in about 4 billion years, which will most likely destroy both galaxies. Until then, move the stars around all you want, but momentum will be conserved and so will the center of mass. There are two problems with this. First, it’s an arbitrary point in space, meaning you can’t sight on it the way you can a landmark like a sun or a black hole. However, it’s pretty central to the galaxy, so most of the time you’ll know roughly in which direction it is. Second, you lose one of your axes, because “coreward” doesn’t exist when you’re at the core and “outward” is any direction at all. So just pick an arbitrary extragalactic object. I’d suggest the Great Attractor, but really anything would do.

In theory you’d run into problems trying to measure mass simultaneously across distances where relativity makes simultaneity a dubious proposition at best. In practice, it won’t be a big problem. The real issue to making your nav computers update galactic spin properly will be solving the 300-billion body problem.

The computer analogy is very apt. As “user friendly” as the internet and computers are to most of us, they really aren’t to anyone not familiar with them. The destinations could be like the navigation bar; you can have a browser history and a quick links or bookmarks tab. That said many of us also memorize addresses so don’t even bother to put them in the bookmarks. Too bad the orb doesn’t have a search engine (a feature that the Star Gates were sorely in need of to, enter a criteria and bring up a list of possible addresses; like a planet with a specific combination of gases in its atmosphere, humanoid life, ect…) Why shouldn’t an instant or portal transportation system be treated much like web browser. Locate, identify, go to it. As well as a scanner for dangers of course.

If Sydney can manually override the safeties that prevent her from popping in too close at a stellar-sized gravity well or a black hole, that could come in handy during a space-bound tactical battle. If she can override the safety & open the Causeway in front of an approaching enemy ship, she could get rid of them (with no return) without even firing a shot from her PPO.

Because Science, YouTube channel, did a video on that subject. Determined that you could travel across the observable universe 158,000 times, picking any straight line of travel for each trip, without hitting anything star or supernova sized.

I was thinking about Cora’s comment that Sydney was the captain of her own starship and Ive decided that that is not quite true…yet at least. She can’t fire her PPO in the vacuum of space as it makes an opening in her shield to do so. This would let all her air (and air pressure) out exposing her to the void. There is no apparent failsafe against this so far as we have sheen shrapnel fly in through said hole to injure Sydney in the recent past.

Also I’m of a kind The the original creators of the orbs hand more than two hands (or whatever) to handle the orbs. I think it likely they could have used all of them at once if need be and if that is indeed the case Sydney will never be able to use them to their fullest.

Pretty sure she can fire with the shield up.
Think she dropped the shield because she didn’t want to drop the flyball.
Dammit, now I gotta archive trawl to figure this out! Lessee, that was what, two months ago?
* * *
Nope. Try over 6 months ago. Anyway…
I think the only time she’s been hit was on page 660, when she had dropped all her balls to upgrade.
She was using her PPO with shield up a few earlier against mechathulu on page 658.
and against the “drones” not long before that.
The PPO does not need to create a “hole” in the shield to fire through.
It is designed to work with the shield, so the beam initiation is outside the shield.
The tentacle works the same way.

Would be nice, butt most people only vote once a month (or less) unless there is a new ‘bribe’ in the form of an invotive
Personally vote at least once a day (or more, depending on how often have to restart browser)

I will note, everyone on the ship seems very blase about the aliens she fought. I would have thought some questions were in order. eg, who were those genocidal aliens who apparently wiped out a powerful space empire overnight.

Call me crazy, but it seems like a pertinent detail.

Plus, of course, are they likely to have realized she has n level tech…..and how likely is it they can trace her planet of origin. By images, scans, dna etc.

Fair point. Don’t forget though that Dabbler will have briefed them that Sydney is clueless about anything off-Earth. So they are bound to get more information examining their own sensor recordings than by interrogating Sydney. And thereby eliminating the risk of traumatising her by reminding her of the life or death experiences she just had. Again I feel it likely that Dabbler will have given Cora a heads up that Sydney has shown to be fairly emotionally fragile.

What Yorp said, chances are they know she doesn’t know anything about them; so there is no real point in questioning her. Especially if they don’t know she fought them. Chances are they think, given Dabbler’s report and the likelihood of Sydney following Maxima’s order to no engage and retreat; that Sydney found some place to hide. I don’t think Sydney has mentioned her upgrades or that she couldn’t open the Aetherium Causeway before; so think Sydney (retreated). They seem now about to find out how she even found her way to the Fracture; questioning how she got there and found it is a more likely question for them to have.

So yeah, chances are no one but Sydney knows right now that Sydney plasma cuttered/laser sliced/exotic particle vivisected some giant alien….and possibly killed a second by blowing its head apart.

Oh Sydney, Sydeny… you never learn, do you? Maybe, just MAYBE, Max has good reasons for disapproving of those things?
Seriously, she’s setting herself up for a fall if she keeps this up. (is that the right expression?)

About the shiny Max drawing. There are other artists you can pay ten dollars to and they’ll give you a sketch of a character that you can then do what you want with.

And some of them can draw abs and all that goodness.

If all you want is to practice SHINY and shading and such, would that be a better shortcut?

…Heck! I think there’s just sketches out there that you could do your thing to, but.. Then there’s very little odds of Maxima shaped things and idk if you’d be able to get permission to post ’em on your site.

I don’t wanna use the person’s name yet! But they LOVE to draw abs and the like and I feel as if they could do a great job. Dave has a deviantart, right? …-I- can spend the ten dollars and throw an @ his way to see if he likes it.

Because she can only say so many words per page before it becomes a boring wall of text?

Plus she would be far better trying to get hold of a translating device, to see if she can find out what it says without letting others know about the state secrets.

Mind you both that and directly asking them are likely to fail. If they are Nth generation tech, and such is considered mythical, then it is unlikely to be written in a language known to lesser races. So far better to investigate a mathematical model / navigational display which can be interpreted far more readily, by those with the relevant skills.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! Am I the only person who wants to see Sydney continue her adventures in space as a member of Cora’s crew?! I Love Grrl Power and the recent turn in events of the story. But I’ve fallen in love with these new characters. It feels like it could be a story arch just like they do in anime. But this is one I would love to see happen!!!! Cora is absolutely my favorite character to be added to the roster.

what if green orb or the unknown is the cockpit like function warp into it and ding starship mode instead of EVA mode. or it forms the cockpit chair and holo slots for each the orbs to use in starship mode.

I reckon the orbs are an educational toy (because of the level up system) that belonged to a nth level child. He was playing on a mudball in an outer spiral arm and left them behind when his mum called him home for dinner.

and you generally know your back yard regardless of size from walking around in it growing up. So even if there is a pond here, an old barn there, forest that gets a bit thick in summer, and some trails; you generally have the jist of it memorized with key landmarks so you can’t really get lost.

Also if it is a backyard; there could be a 36th dimensional buffer fence keeping the kid in the “yard”. Now there is a concept…we are trapped in the yard with an semi-omnipotent child or children without ever realizing where the boarders of the yard are…

-I have a concept where a “higher plane” city turns out to just be a speck on the wall inside the house of such a being; the infinite higher plane is just (inside the house) relatively speaking.

No seriously I saw the original broadcast of that episode. Yeah I’m old, I also got killed at least once (if this customer loyalty card for Charon’s Ferry Service is to be believed I have made 4 trips already and only 6 more trips until my spa day at the Elysian Fields Resort).

A very inspiring episode. While there had been many child like tricksters in the past; usually Fae or gods, this was the first I know of where they turned out to actually be a child for their species rather than just a playful amoral immortal being.

and many a sci-fi sense has used this concept from time to time; also have to love Futurama’s twist LoL

You don’t stay out after dark when you are very little and haven’t learned them yet. Also the house light on the back porch. Modern times, cellphone, now there would be a funny use for the last orb; a homing beacon alerting (home) you are lost and need a pick up.

DaveB, I hope you’re doing okay, taking some time off while you’re sick. But even though you’re sick right now and stressed about not working, I just have to bring up something: Have we told you lately how much we love your color work? (At least, I certainly do!) I vaguely remember you saying your girlfriend was doing some of it, being your colorist, and if so, she’s doing a fantastic job, so please let her know that. (Yes, I’m making you work to pass along the praise.)

(Also, if you suffer from coughing but can’t stomach cough drops, try Starburst fruit chews. Nip off a little piece of one of those squares and then just suck on it, letting it slowly dissolve over time in your mouth. The mix of acidity and sugary taffy will soothe your throat about as well as a cough drop, but without killing you through menthol-eucalyptus-ness. Also, invest in a humidifier and run it; the higher the humidity, the easier it’ll be to breathe, with fewer coughing fits.)

Take care of yourself, m’kay? You haven’t had a break in a while, so don’t feel too guilty or stressed. We’ll enjoy the next comic whenever it comes out…and if anyone complains at you about the delay, I’m sure the rest of us will hold ’em down, tell ’em to shut their mouth..and if they don’t, we’ll just introduce them to just how hot grakz tastes…and remind them of how much more they’re gonna regret opening their mouth, 6-8 hours down the way.

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